Florida State College at Jacksonville Selects CafeScribe eBook Platform to Reduce Textbook Costs

OAK BROOK, Ill., April 21 /PRNewswire/ -- A leading Florida college is using Follett Higher Education Group's (FHEG) CafeScribe® eBook platform to offer custom digital textbooks to the world at an unusually affordable price of less than $50 per eBook.

Traditional textbooks routinely cost $100 or more, adding significant cost to a student's total educational expenses. To address the problem, faculty teams at Florida State College at Jacksonville have written 20 general education textbooks from the ground up. The CafeScribe platform will make it easy for any student at any school to purchase them.

"Florida State College at Jacksonville is applying the latest research on teaching, learning and motivation in every phase of textbook and course development," said Dr. Jack Chambers, chief operating officer for Florida State College at Jacksonville's SIRIUS® course development project. "The CafeScribe platform offers students highly interactive capabilities they lack with traditional textbooks, other digital textbooks or e-readers, making it a great foundation for further improving the learning experience. Follett has been a strategic and responsive partner for distribution of our content."

SIRIUS is an initiative to develop highly affordable, highly interactive courses, including digital textbooks, as well as interactive faculty development programs for Florida State College at Jacksonville and beyond. Students do not have to purchase any additional hardware; instead they can download the free CafeScribe e-reader to their laptop, netbook, Mac or PC and then access the SIRIUS digital textbooks directly from their computer.

With the CafeScribe application, students can highlight passages, search on any word in the text, take margin notes, and share notes with professors and peers. In addition, CafeScribe has unique social networking tools tailored to support collaborative learning. These tools expand the boundaries of a student's learning environment and also help build communities of learners. Students using a common textbook title can easily network, discuss and share notes not only with students enrolled in their own course, but with those using that title at other campuses, schools, and even across the globe.

"The digital textbook market is maturing fast," said Chambers. "Now that we see what digital textbooks can do, we are asking ourselves what we would like them to do."

"FHEG and Florida State College at Jacksonville have a long history of working together and are looking forward to expanding our relationship," said Gary Shapiro, senior vice president of intellectual properties at Follett Higher Education Group. "We are pleased that Florida State College at Jacksonville has chosen our CafeScribe application as the eBook platform for SIRIUS. We believe the students will not only embrace the price of the materials but the many communication and study tools that are a part of the CafeScribe platform."

To keep costs low and learning effective, Florida State College at Jacksonville is authoring its textbooks closely to state standards.  The textbooks average 250 pages rather than the 600-plus pages that are typical of traditional, bound textbooks.

Through SIRIUS, Florida State College at Jacksonville is a pioneer in flexible, affordable, creative, interactive education, whether face-to-face, blended or online. For example, it has created electronic avatars (next-generation facsimiles of human beings) to escort students through online learning environments. The SIRIUS team course development approach, teaming faculty with instructional designers and multimedia specialists, supports more faculty members in their efforts to engage students with current research and interactive technologies, prompting them to try new, more effective learning approaches.

Under a new program, Project DELTA (Disseminating Effective Learning Through Automation), funded by a $728,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education of the U. S. Office of Education, SIRIUS is working with a consortium of ten higher education institutions throughout the United States. These institutions include Anne Arundel Community College (Maryland), Central Piedmont Community College (North Carolina), College of Coastal Georgia, Evergreen Valley College (California), Genesee Community College (New York), Mountain View Community College (Texas), Pellissippi Community College (Tennessee), Phoenix College (Arizona), Snead State Community College (Alabama), and Southern University at Shreveport (Louisiana). Faculty at these institutions will receive online professional development training at no cost, and will beta test the 20 courses while assisting SIRIUS with the development of an additional 20 courses over the next three years.  

Chambers urges any institution interested in developing or beta testing SIRIUS courses to join the Project DELTA educational consortium (the International Academy for the Scholarship of Learning Technology) by contacting him at [email protected] or 904-632-3231.  Faculty at member institutions are eligible for stipends and free admission to the consortium's annual International Conference on College Teaching and Learning – the most recent edition of the conference is taking place April 19-23, 2010, in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.

About CafeScribe

The CafeScribe eBook platform is an e-textbook and social networking platform for students and educators. The platform is the latest addition to Follett's broad portfolio of course material options for students, available online and at more than 850 college bookstores operated by Follett in the United States and Canada. For more information, visit www.cafescribe.com.

About Follett Higher Education Group

Follett Higher Education Group of Oak Brook, Illinois, is the leading provider of bookstore services and the foremost supplier of used books in North America. Follett services five million students and over 400,000 faculty members through more than 850 stores. Follett also services more than 1,600 independent campus stores with its wholesale services, and has the most visited ecommerce collegiate website, efollett.com, that provides services and products through a network of more than 900 campus stores.

About Follett

Follett Corporation is a $2.7 billion, privately held company that provides products, services and solutions to the educational marketplace. www.follett.com

SOURCE Follett Higher Education Group